


Living Names

by yarn_and_loopholes



Category: Elsewhere University (Webcomic)
Genre: Also submitted to Elsewhere University Tumblr, Fae & Fairies, Fae loopholes, Friend Love, Gen, Love Wins, No actual deadnaming, Nonbinary Character, Original Female Character - Freeform, Original Nonbinary Character - Freeform, Safenames, Trans Characters, Trans Female Character, True Names, Use of one's own deadname for personal magical gain, chosen names
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-01
Updated: 2020-12-01
Packaged: 2021-03-09 19:28:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 998
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27811510
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yarn_and_loopholes/pseuds/yarn_and_loopholes
Summary: A student's reflection, through the lens of names.
Relationships: Original characters & The Gentry (Elsewhere University)
Kudos: 12





	Living Names

My father whispered to me when he first held me, a name my mother loved, a name taken from a grandmother. Growing up, I would abandon it at the drop of a hat, in favor of a noun or the name of a character I liked, or a collection of syllables that tumbled jubilantly on my tongue. None of these lasted more than a week.

When I was nine, I read a very well-known fantasy book. It had been adapted into a very well-known movie. The protagonist had my name. She was bold (which I was not), and stubborn (which I was), and clever (which I hoped to be), and she was female.

On her, the name sounded vivid and bright, bold yellow sunshine and turquoise, like a forget-me-not. On me, it felt like things seen through a frosted-over window. Faded blue and the pale color of frozen butter, wisps of wrinkled wisteria.

When I was seventeen, the year I slipped on another set of pronouns like a beaded bracelet over my wrist (the year I learned I could have more than one set if I wanted to, the year I started collecting them as any magpie would), I slipped my given name off of my shoulders and folded it up in my cold hands. I found another name, one with a glowing orange ember nestled in twists of brown dark wood, and I brought it inside me and it warmed my core. The old name I would have returned, hung neatly on its hanger and delivered to my mother, but instead I kept it in an old dusty dressbox, to be taken out again and worn superficially, as a costume, when I attended certain family gatherings.

When I was eighteen, I went to university, a strange old college on a hill. I did not grow into a young woman, but I did not mind because I was me. For the first time no one I lived with knew my old, dead, wisteria-withered name. I was blazing, I was orange, I was bright as my living name. No one used their birth names there, which made it all the merrier, because that’s what college is for, right? Figuring out what fits you. I loved the Name I’d chosen, but I still cycled through moniker after alias, just to feel the joy of the syllables.

I learned many things while I was there. I asked people before taking their pictures. I carried a supply of my own food. Iron washers from my thieving friends in the scene shop clangled joyfully around my neck (I experimented with personal style, queer as the self I was). I was kind to insects and I left milk outside my dorm room door at night, and I was delighted that no one chastised me, as my parents had, for being overfriendly to the wild animals. (You know, almost every animal likes attention at some point, and reading my stories out loud is a great way to justify quality time.)

I met people. I met professors who cared about my learning, fellow students with stories to share, RAs fiercer than any dragon to defend their charges. There was the sick new boy to whom I fed soup once, on a whim, when I was feeling homesick and making use of the kitchen, and later he gave me a blown glass flower. There was the kid who borrowed some of my baking butter, and was so profusely and profoundly grateful without ever quite saying “thank you.” There was the girl I met in my sophomore year, with the long black hair and five ear piercings, and we became best friends and we talked about names.

Her name started out black as rock, though I could never tell if that was simply an association with the color of her hair. In the middle, there sparkled the vowels and the twists of consonants, bright metal and stone in the depths of a cave. I didn’t quite believe all the stories she told, but then I read her some ones of mine that were not true. She’d named herself for a bird of the sea, plucked her girl’s name from one no one had meant for a girl. We talked about ways one might come to know these things, and the kinds of things one could learn on the edges.

She liked the edges; she found things. Changes of the kind she needed most. I worried for her rarely, because I knew she was so careful. But careful doesn’t always cut it out here.

The second week before graduation, I went looking for her. I found, readily enough, a place where she had been, and I found someone who didn’t want to give her back. I asked them what they wanted, and they asked what she was worth.

I would have said, “my life,” but I was afraid to die before I saw her again.

I would have said, “my heart,” but I needed that to love her.

So instead I said, “A name,” and I watched moon eyes glow with an unearthly-wide smile.

“Not any name will do,” said the mouth, and maybe something behind it.

“I will give you my birth Name, the one my mother gave me and my father whispered as I cried.”

They stretched out themself, and curled loose around me, and I knew I would have to sell this. So I said the name I hadn’t used in years, said it with all the cornflower and yellowyellowyellow of that heroine from long ago.

They gibbered, and they stretched out one palm, and my best friend in the entire world stood on the cobbles to my left, and, no time for happy reunions, we ran like hell across the sprinkler-soaked sidewalk for the saltlick safety of our dorm, because I didn’t know how long it would take the creature in the courtyard to realize all I’d given them was a handful of dried-up wisteria.


End file.
